Not only does this film provide the most bizarre, not to mention feeble romantic pairing since Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovitt, but it delivers never-ending hilarity in the form of human incineration.

Ohmigosh….the earths core has reached a boiling point and like the pent up frustration of an adolescent boy the lava’s got to escape the confines of the planets mantel and crust! Where will the tonnes upon tonnes of molten rock go? LA. That’s where. Flash to 5 burly guys in hard hats and luminescent pinny’s squeezing down a manhole to perform some ‘plot’ dependent work on gas-mains. Let the hilarity and incineration begin.

Amidst violent eruptions on Wiltshire Blvd and a permanent rain of ash, expert: Anne Heche and sceptic: Tommy Lee Jones try to form not only a scientific alliance, but a romantic one. With all the chemistry of a biology lab these two fumble through two hours of lava flows, constant screaming, lessons in racial equality and tolerance for your fellow man (even if he’s a woman).

One and a half hours in, we breath a sigh of relief as LA’s finest (directed by TLJ) stop the painfully slow moving lava. Lava that’s creeping through the city faster than you can say….. speak and define; antidisestablishmentarianism. About two dozen helicopters and about 80 fire trucks saturate the magma with gallons and gallons of water and LA is saved. *cheering*

Right.

Cheering continues until clever Anne Heche realizes it’s not over till it’s daylight and thousands of innocent peoples lives are in peril.

Cue: impossible to execute plan, this time involving a precision building demolition. Now imagine TLJ’s daughter is in the basement of that building. (laugh track)

I won’t ruin it for all y’all by telling you TLJ charges into the demolition zone to save his idiot daughter and some token 4 year old kid. He catapults himself on top of the 2 children in the nick of time. After a tense 3 seconds or so TLJ emerges from the rubble carrying the random kid, with his idiot daughter crawling out behind him….. all three…. unscathed. Random kid looks across the masses of firefighters, doctors, looters, and blue collar workers and poignantly whispers.

“they all look the same”

Pan on ash covered crowd. (pause) 7 gratuitous seconds later the sky opens, and sunbeams dapple the throngs of people. The rain of hope and new beginnings begins to fall heavily. Washing away all traces of ash, reminding us we’re all very different, different is bad, and camaraderie in the face of an urban volcano will never EVER change that.

TLJ and AH exchange useless banter and don’t kiss in the down pour, as much as we want them to. Instead the movie ties up nicely with Anne offering Tommy, his idiot daughter and their golden lab a lift home in her Hummer. Helpfully leaving a slew of fires in Hollywood, mudslides in Malibu and a 2 mile wide bubbling crater smack dab in the middle of Beverly Hills.

John Corbett is in the movie as well, but he appears about as frequently as rational thinking. Twice.